Barista Incentives

unpublished, 2023

Teaching my sister's dog how to do "paw" made me realize that animals only do things they need, not what they want.

In coffee, there is no incentive for a barista to master their craft, and that's why you see so many baristas churn out to work as servers or to take up customer support roles in tech.

A rosetta or a stacked heart still means $5 to a customer.

This is why inflation is so devastating to the artist class. The gentry class can afford takeout dinner going from $15 to $20 and now $30.

Restaurants take an outsized percentage of the inflation burden. When takeaway cups go from $0.25 to $1.25, restaurants are forced to increase prices, which for the most part is passed onto the customer.

But because tip is only paid after the fact, customers are now tipping less, because their valuation of the meal lags behind inflation adjusted prices. To the customer, the latte is still with $6 = $5 + $1, so if the cafe increases prices to $7, it's the barista who eats the cost, not actually the consumer.

Square and Toast now allow restaurants to set default tip options – I've never eaten a dinner in New York where the default tips are anything less than 18%, even for takeout. Some of this is learned behavior during COVID, where customers finally learned of how thin restaurant margins truly were – and service workers realized how little income stability their jobs truly implied.

Many customers complain to me that there is no true "Fika" in NYC. That's because New York City is a casino. There's a rare air that gets pumped into this place; it's an intoxicating dream, as long as you have money.

If we really want baristas to hone their craft, customers will have to value it first.